Imagined Homes

Soviet German Immigrants During the Cold War
Erscheinungsjahr 2007
ISBN: 978-0-88755-701-9
Verlag: University of Manitoba Press

Buch, Englisch, 304 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 228 mm, Gewicht: 452 g

Reihe: Studies in Immigration and Culture

Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities is a study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined trajectory of immigrant lives influenced the process of integration into a new urban environment.

Winnipeg's migrants chose a receiving society where they knew they would again be a minority group in a foreign country, while Bielefeld's newcomers believed they were “going home” and were unprepared for the conflict between their imagined homeland and the realities of post-war Germany.

Werner also shows that differences in the way the two receiving societies perceived immigrants, and the degree to which secularization and the sexual and media revolutions influenced these perceptions in the two cities, were crucially important in the immigrant experience.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Werner, Hans

Über Autor(innen)

Hans Werner teaches Canadian History and Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. His current research includes German and Mennonite migration in the Soviet Union and early Mennonite settlements in western Canada. He is the author of Living Between Worlds: A History of Winkler and The Constructed Mennonite: History, Memory, and the Second World War.